Related Artists

Graham Anderson

By Genevieve Allison

February 2010

Graham Anderson
NICE AND FIT
Brunnenstrasse 13
January 16–March 12

With four small paintings and two drawings, Graham Anderson’s solo exhibition at this gallery is one of the more intimate and understated shows on view now in Berlin. The title of the show is “New Paintings and Drawings,” despite the fact that these works have emerged over a period of three years, and in 2008, one was exhibited at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in Brooklyn, where the artist lives. Anderson’s pace is slow, however, and his rarefied output presents a considered and delicate process of making choices and execution.

Similar to the ways in which such painters as Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans, and David Hockney have explored the influence of photography on painting, Anderson’s pictorial style offers a digital or graphic imagemaking sensibility. His morphing forms, use of motifs, and flattened spatial dimensions bring to mind the stylized and reductive nature of classic cel animation and low-bit computer graphics. Untitled, 2009, a painting of a lone cloud rendered in scalloped brushstrokes, takes as its subject a popular muse for poets, landscape painters, and screen savers alike. While generating a tension between the man-made and natural realms, the work, like several others in the show, also points to oppositions between interior and exterior landscapes, figuration and abstraction, flatness and depth. Like minimal poetry, Anderson’s paintings are products of an economy of means, as well as of a restriction of expression.